


The Split Veil

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Don't Judge Me, F/M, I mean feferi is a selkie but you know, I'm a writer not a tagger, M/M, Multi, Necromancy, Selkies, well kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 12:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7715632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eridan has been drawn to the sea since his accident, returning to the same spot. Something else he finds there draws him in further.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Split Veil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thescyfychannel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescyfychannel/gifts).



The ocean speaks to you.

Maybe it always has, you think, your bare foot curling an indent in wet sand, compacted by the gentle sloshing, breathing, thing that calls out to you. Eridan, it bids, come. Come and put your feet in the water, and your body, too. Come and let the arms of the ocean rock you.

But that was what it was like before the accident, wasn’t it? That was why you dragged Sollux out to live in that tiny cement shelter that serves as a house, on a beach so remote that there ain’t even a good hot dog stand for miles. You don’t mind. Less tourists to chuck rubbish back at.

The ocean was the important thing, besides. You’d been living in that city far too long – an education was hardly worth all that dry air. All those chemicals in your lungs.

You breathe in.

Salt is a chemical too, but it purifies. It draws toxins out. You gargled with it for a month when you came here, and you still gather bucketfulls to refine. You gather kelp, and sea grapes, and fish – all full of it, no matter how you scrub. Man requires, and the sea provides.

But it doesn’t matter. You don’t pull yourself the rest of the way in. You don’t let your body drop, soft, to the floor in the shallow water so that the waves can sway you, twist your curls, kiss you with the vital tang of salt. You stand on shore, and let the waves make trenches of your feet.

Only up to the ankles. You promised Sollux that. With the nearest hospital an hour out, he’s the sole reason you’re here. Him and his lisping, raspy, asthmatic CPR; his snorting, hiccoughing, crying caring as he half carried you back to your house.

He said it was a seal. There sure was a lot of fucking blood for a cute little seal, you remember thinking. But you don’t remember any of it, so what’s the point? What’s the point in arguing? What’s the point in wanting to dive right back in?

You feel the spray cling to your lashes as you hold your eyes shut. The sound fills your ears. No gulls cry, no car engines thrum. For a moment, you don’t even think you are breathing. There’s just the sound of the ocean, crashing into you in the only way it can now – in your ears, and gently at your feet.

And then, something closes around your ankle, and you have all of a second before the ground comes out from beneath you.

“FUCK,” you shout, because as loquacious as you are, you’ve never denied being crude, either. And besides, you know the feeling between seaweed and hands, and that is definitely a fucking hand, and now you’re staring, horrified, trying to anchor yourself in soft sand as someone – something – uses your body to pull its own from the greedy tug of receding waves.

“Help – “it says, she says, “Help me –“

It is a she, you think. She is a she, you amend. Despite yourself, despite everything you’ve ever been told about strange things, everything you’ve promised Sollux, you’re on your knees in moments, reaching in and pulling hard, dragging the woman from the cold waves and up to shore. You manage your hands around her – she’s too heavy to lift, you don’t know why, you aren’t a weakling. But you manage to help her to the large, flat rocks the sun has been baking all day, help her to lay down against them, to heat her in the cold.

You were thinking of how cold her soaked clothes must be. You didn’t take the time to realize she isn’t wearing any.

“Are you – You need some water?” you ask, uselessly, and she lays there for a moment. Then, her head turns towards you, and you see the lovely features of her face – a broad nose, and big black eyes, and lips that are lovely even when they’re curled into a rueful smile.

“I’ve had enough water, I think,” she tells you. “For the moment, at least.”

“I have a house here. I… I’d have to get someone to help, but we could take you back there?” You’ve never been unsure about a goddamn thing in your life. Why is she making you so nervous? Why is the steady gaze in those black eyes making you freeze up, inadequate?

“You can help me here.” she says. Her soft belly heaves a moment with a sharp breath, and she forces herself up onto one arm for a moment. The glossy black coils of her hair are already drying. They still run over her body, cling close to her face, a perpetual oil spill. One finger ticks forward, beckoning. “Come.”

Something in the center of you gathers, and you jerk forward before you even realize what you’re doing, your feet digging into dry sand in jerky steps. Once you accept the inevitable and commit to moving towards her, they become smooth, and soft.

You can feel the sway of the current when she pulls you down against the rock.

Her arms are strong, the muscles thick, covered in a layer of soft skin and a little fat, belying her power. You find out her entire body is that way as she manipulates you beneath her, sliding over you until the coils of her inky hair tickle your face and neck. She has freckles you can see, and scars you can feel without even touching.

She’s as cold as the sea.

When her lips touch yours, you tense. But your body jerks again and you feel the same way you did walking towards her, reaching out to help her – kissing back is inevitable, and you slowly sink into it, your lashes fluttering.

When you kiss Sollux, heat rushes to your cheeks. But none comes now. Only the weak sensation of fainting, the concentration of gravity at the front of your head, your eyes shut as you try to hold on. Your heart beats painfully in your chest.

The kiss breaks, and you suck in a breath, lurching upwards, your vision dancing in circles. Your head falls back, too weak to focus, too weak to fight. White spots prick at your vision until they’re eaten away with black.

She is gone.

-

“I think I met a mermaid.”

It’s the kind of statement you would have wet yourself over when you were ten. Right now, it just feels kind of weird, standing with your back against the door to your little cement house, and looking into the eyes of the total jerk you’ve somehow partnered up with for life. He’s staring back at you with that heterochromic gaze of his. He’s staring at you like a fucking idiot.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Sollux tells you, frowning. “Mermaids don’t exist.”

“Siren then. Whatever you wanna call her, she came out the fuckin water and disappeared right back into it. And considerin she left me passed out an vulnerable on a fuckin rock, I could do with a little more sympathy,” you sniff.

Sollux’s mouth tightens, and so do the muscles in his neck. You know what’s coming next. It’s not the expression that he gets right before he’s about to yell at you, but you somehow really wish it were.

Instead, he walks towards you, his hands outstretched, and he puts one on your head and one on your neck and you can see his mouth counting out seconds and pulses, duality codified even in the way that he takes your pulse and temperature. The hand on your forehead moves in front of your eyes. You follow it – left, right, up, down.

He’s still frowning.

“Sol, I’m fine. I ain’t got brain damage from that accident, an you know it.” You’re more terse than you want to be, but he keeps looking at you like that, and it puts you on edge. You want him to look at you like he used to, lighthearted and maybe a little annoyed.

“We don’t know that. You never got checked,” Sollux tells you. His fingers smooth back through your curls, tossed helter-skelter in the events of the day. That touch melts your resolve to be angry with him when he treats you like this. His voice lowers, and even with that ridiculous lisp, it’s still sweeter than anything you ever tasted, sun lit honey on his tongue. “Come to bed with me.”

“To sleep?” you ask, grinning like an eel as you pull him up to carry him. He bites your ear. The kiss over it is hotter for it.

“To perform your husbandly duties after leaving me here all day, fish fucker.”

Your grin widens. You think you can live with that.

-

You’re out again the next morning.

It isn’t that you like lying to Sollux, or making him worry. But at this point, you know he’s going to worry anyway, and it isn’t much of a lie when he knows your promises won’t stick. But you can’t help it.

The ocean speaks to you.

It’s the first thing you hear every morning, when you wake in twilight. You hear the waves, and you smell the salt air, and you find your feet treading out onto the bluffs, down the slopes of them to the shore. You follow, beckoned. By the ocean, and now, you find, by another.

She’s there. Sitting on the flat rocks, her hair looking even more like an oil slick as its painted by the impossible colours of freshly broken sun. She doesn’t have to tell you this time; you walk over to her, your feet silent in the sand.

“Are you going to make me pass out again?” you open. She smiles. Her teeth are short, and too sharp.

“I might,” she tells you. “You did seem to enjoy it.”

“The preceedin act was what I was enjoyin. Not that you should go spreadin it around, I got a jealous kind a husband.”

Her large eyes go blank for a moment as she stares at you. You rub your thumb over the ring on your finger, your wedding band, of sorts. Silver, embedded with a chip of moonstone. For protection, Aradia had explained to you, with a wink, which you always thought was pretty messed up. To mention your accident on a goddamn handfasting day. But it makes a nice distraction, the cool hardness of it soothing as the siren thinks.

“Oh. Is that like a mate?” she asks. “I don’t need to worry about that. I’m very strong.”

“Is that why I had to drag your sorry ass outta the water yesterday?” you ask, and her eyes narrow.

“That was an exception. I hadn’t fed for a long time, and I had a very grueling experience. It’s hard to swim after you shed your skin, you know.”

“I don’t. Humans don’t shed skins,” you murmur. This makes her eyes go wide and blank again, as though she were surprised by that.

“They don’t?” she asks.

“What the hell would we be other than humans?” you ask, and she bats her eyes.

“The flying things,” she says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And honestly, you’re kind of hoping that if this is brain damage that it’s permanent, because that’s just about the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.

“Uh, yeah. No. We’re just us. Why would we be birds?”

“You hunt for our fish.” She frowns, thoughtful. The expression is beautiful and alien on her round face. “Though I always did think it was stupid that you humans never flew away from sinking ships, I guess.”

“Whose the other part of our?” you ask her, and she blinks up at you again, her expression smoothing out.

“The other seals, I suppose. Though, I meant it more broadly. It just seems selfish that you’d take things from the water when you can walk about on land, too. You have plenty of food up there. You risk safety of yourselves and of everything in the water,” she says.

You shrug. “Not that I’m arguin but… Humans come from the water. Or, we did. A long time ago.”

“I know that,” she says. Her eyes stare into yours, and you somehow feel the world shift. You realize you’ve been standing very close to her for quite some time now. You’re leaned so far down that your faces are almost touching. “We couldn’t feed on you, otherwise. The other seals and me. Your energy is singularly nourishing. So you must have started in the sea. You were just stupid enough to leave.”

“Whoa, what? Feed on us?” you ask, jerking back a little. “Wait, fuck? Was that what you were doing to me?”

“Yes. But you weren’t supposed to faint. I didn’t take all that much,” she tells you. For some stupid reason, you believe her. “I never do. But I was tired, and I needed something. Fish and kelp can only give so much nutrition, and I can’t go back to my old hunting grounds.”

“Why not?” you ask. Her mouth presses thin, which is honestly kind of an astounding feat.

“My mother leads our pack. She favours sucking humans dry and only feeding occasionally. I tried to convince her otherwise. It didn’t work.”

You find yourself sitting down beside her. Your fingers reach out to brush back her hair in the way Sollux does to you. Her eyes go a little softer, and you know that’s what he sees in you every time, too. Must be some sort of magic, you think, because it’s feeling realer all the time.

“Are you safe out here?”

“Oh, yes. She’s loath to come ashore. Even close to it, really,” she bumps her head up against your hand, and you resume petting her. “All I need is food, really… And maybe a friend? I could bring you things. Shells. Kelp. Crustaceans…”

“How about your name? That can pay for last time, I reckon. My kisses are pretty valuable property, but I’m not above discounts to the beautiful an disenfranchised,” you grin. She grins back, sharper.

“Feferi,” she says, getting closer. Her cold lips brush against yours. “My name is Feferi.”


End file.
